Congrats to my friends at Topspin Media for helping David Byrne and Brian Eno release their new album today. I’ve been a fan of David Byrne since he wore oversized jackets (“geek is chic”). I drove 2.5 hours to Indianapolis to see him in college in an old van that had no business being on the road – his music was way ahead of its time and totally blew us away. And is his show last summer at the Bowl was epic. Good times. And I have listened to Eno’s Music For Airports on headphones in coach coming back from somewhere east (and a few times west) of California more times than I can count since my brother-in-law Sam introduced me to it probably a decade ago. I listened to the new album this morning, and I agree with everyone else – it’s great. You can stream it here for free, and then there are a bunch of options for purchasing direct from the artists’ site itself.
I installed the new Disqus Wordpress plugin this week. I had held off before because it didn’t support trackbacks but the new features made it seem worth a try. I was really impressed because it did NOT go smoothly.
The process is: 1) Install and activatate the plugin. 2) Tell Discus to import your existing comments from the Wordpress database. I can tell you from experience that #2 doesn’t scale well. Database import/expoorts, no matter how simple, basically need to be overseen by a human because some percentage of the time the import/export is going to be misaligned. Whomever the product people are at Discus had 2 options – they could make ME the lowly blogger manage and debug the process or they could have someone there do it. Making me do it scales better (in theory they need fewer employees per new user). It also guarantees that some of their customers are going to have bad user experiences.
Per my post on the new brand math, it’s crucial in the Internet age that you manage every single customer interaction. Asking users to debug database import/exports would be a big mistake.
So there WAS a problem with my import/export. I found out because AndrewB at Disqus sent me an email. I emailed him back telling him I was pulling the plugin down, and to let me know when I should try it again. He emailed me back this morning and told me “We fixed the glitch”. I turned Discus back on, and found all my comments imported successfully.
If Disqus had relied on me to debug the import/export, I likely would have pulled the product down and grumbled a little. Instead, they managed the interaction and got a customer and a glowing blog post. That is how you scale a business.
Jen’s garden is going off this week. We’ve got abundant herbs, chilis, cucumbers and tons of other stuff. But the tomatoes are the star of the show. We are probably getting 2 or 3 pints a day out of it right now. We’ve got big purple heirlooms, perfect red Romas, then 2 kinds of cherry and some yellow grapes. I’m not very much help with gardening itself, but I love preparing them as they come in. Here’s what we’ve done so far.
Sliced with salt – During July August and September eat as many raw, freshly harvested tomatoes as you can: as a snack, in salads, on sandwiches. It’s hands down the best way to enjoy them. We’ve made gifts to some friends and neighbors, which is good karma any way you look at it.
Gazpacho – This is a great recipe even without the seafood, basically substitute in whatever veggies are best in your house that day (and don’t feel like you have to run to the store if you don’t have everything – improvise, its about the fresh tomatoes). Cucumbers, fresh chilies, zuchini, grean beans and lettuce would all work well.
Sun Dried – I threw about 15 halved and salted cherries in the oven on low for 6 hours and dried them out – it’s a welcome variation and fresh tomatoes really make a difference. I made some fresh pork sausages with them that were sublimely tasty (a lot of fresh basil and oregano, some red wine. Don’t forget the back fat.) We’ll probably take 3 or 4 pints of our remaining harvest and dry them then store them under oil for the winter. I may even try to dry them using the actual sun.
Quick sauce – Some people claim they don’t make sauce with fresh tomatoes (cause raw are much better), but Jen and I really look forward to August and a quick simple sauce from fresh tomatoes, run through a food mill over fresh wide pasta. Olive oil, a little onion, an herb, salt and pepper.
PS Get well soon to my Dad, whose garden is defnitely bigger than your dad’s garden. He had his hip replaced Friday and is recovering well, although he isn’t the kind of guy that likes to be cooped up in a hospital room in August. I made my first dollar when I was six or seven selling tomatoes from his backyard plot to a local restauranteur.
I installed the 
